Be Afraid: The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky hits PSP March 29th

Fair warning. If an all-consuming desire for a meaty RPG replete with a shiny metal Bracer badge, soundtrack and poster* should sacrifice your wallet to the gaming gods, your PSP is ours for the next 50+ hours of your life. You will be held hostage to its crushing narrative, and YOU WILL LIKE IT.

Salutations, readers. My name is Jessica Chavez, and I have worked on such delights as Half-Minute Hero and Rune Factory: Frontier, and inserted something salacious about Pikkards into Ys I&II. I also toiled for months on the enormity that is The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, which hits the PSP on March 29, and I shall tell you about it today.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (also known affectionately as “TitS” thanks to the tender caress of the internet) is an RPG that was first released in 2004 for the PC. It gained fame and notoriety on the computer circuit by virtue of being both massive and the first 3D iteration of its kind within the Legend of Heroes series. Fast-forward to 2011 and you now have a PSP version crammed with all the original goodness, polished to a blinding sheen and accented with newly added battle voices. There’s also one crucial addition that is very relevant for you, the reader: those ~1.5 million characters of Japanese have since been put through the translation grinder. Trails in the Sky is ready for its Western debut.

Which brings me to you, the buyer. How will you know if this is the game for you? Let us count the ways…

1) The script for the game was so huge that the translation/editing process straddled 3 separate years (November 2009 to February 2011), which translates to a) employee dementia and b) some serious value for your money.

2) You will travel this huge, detailed world and bludgeon things to death.

3) The dismembered body parts of your foes are great for cooking.

4) There are no random encounters.

5) You do not need to grind, but if that pleases you, you may mill your little heart into tiny, tiny stats.

6) There is a sizeable and painstakingly crafted plot under all those text windows.

7) There is a rotating 3D camera function, and holding either the L or R buttons for prolonged periods of time will make any secondary parties that are watching quite motion sick (I have tried this and enjoyed their suffering; you will too).

Anyway, between all the unfolding plot points and dungeon crawling, you have rock-solid gameplay and a virtual interactive novel. As our in-house Falcom fanboy has said before, “It strikes a nice balance between hardcore and accessible, and as long as you don’t mind a game that’s about 70% narrative and 30% action, I guarantee you’ll be hooked.” He’s also said that Dinosaur Resurrection is the pinnacle of gaming, but I think he’s right on this one.

Trails in the Sky will release on both PSN and UMD on March 29th for $29.99. As mentioned above, there will also be a Limited Edition package which will contain a soundtrack CD, a 13-inch by 19.5-inch poster and a Bracer Guild replica metal badge for the suggested retail price of $39.99.

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Say, I know you amazing worker-bees at XSEED are dedicated to brining out the rest of the series in NA, but on what platform? The second instalment is massive, 2 UMDs, I believe. Would be sweet to have it on the NGP. Supreme upscaled sprite goodness! It would fit perfectly on the NGP media sticks (or whatever they’re called). In the very least keep up with the digital stuff. All of my XSEED PSP games are digital – incredibly convenient, especially for portables.

You need to nag Sony about a Wild Arms HD collection for the PS3! :) Such a pipe-dream, I know, but that would be ace.

Trails in the Sky (FC) is a definite go for UMD and PSN, but (as you may have heard a la Falcom’s press release) there have been some issues about getting SC to… er, fit, on PSN. It’s something we’re concerned about, but we’re exploring all possibilities, and we’d definitely love to have it on the NGP.

Awesome. I’ve been wanting this game for awhile now. Problem is there are so many rpgs releasing on PSP lately, especially with all the psone classics. BUT….I will still have to pick it up. I’m very excited. Great post.

Thanks and thanks! The PSP is definitely steeped in RPG goodness, so it’s hard to make a decision, but with TitS you can at least guarantee that you’re going to get some serious play for your money. Expect at least 40-50hrs of core gameplay. If you take on quests and go the gregarious route then you’ll be at this game for a while. And if you’re Tom (Wyrdwad a.k.a. Falcom fan boy a.k.a. my coworker) you’ll spend 120+ hours playing through for QA. :)

this game seems to be full of win.but i have a question.are the bosses difficult like other previous xseed titles just like ys7 for example?

also, does this game enjoys voice acting?otherwise, i surely will buy this!
thank you xseed for bringing these types of games to our shores,i’m sure that i’m not the only one who appreciates your bussiness.

also, thanks to the playstation blog team for bringing you guys on the blog :)

Thanks for your support, and we always enjoy being on the Playstation Blog! Now, allow me to tackle your questions…

1) The bosses can be hard, BUT(!) Trails in the Sky has a nifty little feature that will ease your pain: “Retry Offset” – Basically, if you turn it on (I think it might defaults to on actually), each time you get Game Over and choose to retry a battle, the enemies will be significantly weaker. So the more you fail, the easier it will be to succeed!<–As Tom says.

(This is yet another reason why this game is great for Hardcore enthusiasts and Casual players alike.)

2) As for voice acting, TitS only has battle voices. That may please some and displease others.

I’ve had the Premium Edition pre-ordered as soon as it was added to Videogamesplus’s selections, just like every other excellent XSeed release. Here’s hoping TitS SC will not take too long to localize, although that might be a fool’s wish taking into account the amount of text in it. :S Hopefully First Chapter sells well enough to make the sequels worth localizing.

“What I still don’t get is what type of game is it, action/rpg, srpg, etc.”

It’s got a battlesystem that’s kind of like a mix of traditional turn-based systems & SRPGs. All-in-all it’s a pretty traditional JRPG with some excessive world building & attention to details.

Well, that’s translating AND editing (which includes QA), so it’s actually a total of 16 months that just happen to straddle 2009-2011. Still, it’s a LONG time for localizing a game. I’m sure bigger companies could have done it faster, but they have more personnel.

OMG!! This game is just too awesome, GETTING THIS RELEASED IN ENGLISH IS TO GOOD TO BE TRUTH, one of the hugest RPG out there!, and is a great RPG made by our beloved FALCOM, every game these guys make is gold, plus the sexy HQ translation from XSEED, pfft, i’m more than sold, im going to make my friends get it too, even if they dont have PSP.
Saw some battle videos, looks nice and every movement counts, nice combination of SRPG with classic turn based RPG, the batles also move with a nice pace, and are fast enough, the english voices sound pretty good too.

If someone considers himself/herself a decent gamer this game NEEDS to bee in your game’s library!

Wow. Wall-o-awesome. High praise indeed (yay!), and I really like the sound of “sexy HQ translation” too. We really did our best, and if you’ll forgive some lines that were obviously the product of fried brains, then we’ll get along just fine. ^_- We also really appreciate you (and everyone else) spreading the word about the game. Word of mouth is what keeps us going, and you better believe it that every time we see a post online about one of our games our eyes tear up and the marketing guy weeps uncontrollably in the kitchen.

A dictionary for cats, bludgeoning, and a bath scene!? Craziness!! Once again Jess you have sold me on a game I’ve had pre-ordered for many months, and hopefully as many people as there are Japanese characters in the game will also be convinced to go out and grab it. Many congrats to yourself and the rest of XSEED for getting this one out the door, quite an impressive feat, and I’ll be really looking forward to seeing the rest of the series after I beat the absolute crap out of this one.

Thanks very much from me and the rest of the team! I’m hoping that by highlighting some of the more absurd bits of the game that people will take that first step into said “crushing narrative.” LoH is a somewhat obscure series and there are so many things coming out right now that I don’t want Trails to get buried under other releases. I will fight to get this game attention! (And if character count = buyers, then… I don’t know. Heads would explode or some other extremely violent reaction. Happily violent, though.) (^_^)

Once you get in deep and are bludgeoning the stuffing out of Trails, I look forward to your reaction on the matter of the dialogue gem that is Olivier. ^_-

Meaty RPG huh… I always have room for more of those. However as I buy all of my PSP games digitally, I’m not sure about jumping into this series since, as already mentioned, the second game may not make it to PSN. It would suck to invest time and money into this series only to miss out on part of it. Going to have to take a wait and see approach here.

By the way since there seems to be an abundance of Ys LE soundtracks floating around out there, is there any way I could buy copies of each directly from XSeed? The music for each of them is great but since I purchased each game through PSN I missed out on all of the LE goodness. :(

Tom is sitting to my left with a querulous look upon his face. I can only imagine that he is doing something that lacks joy or is related to paperwork somehow. ^_^

Trails in, indeed, a full course meal, but a wait-and-see-approach may actually have the opposite effect. If games don’t sell, it’s hard to justify the cost of working on the next. We’re definitely doing everything we can to bring out the rest of the series, but if everyone does a “wait-and-see” approach and there’s no tangible support for the first one, well…

I’m not trying to pressure you one way or the other (because you have a very valid point, and I totally get it), it’s just not a… hoped for response, anyway.

Thanks, Daojones! It was fun to write it (and especially fun to call attention to the cat-dictionary). We’d love a pre-order and I think this music sample (a la youtube) might sway you all the way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODjj64QFV2g (Silver Will)

We have no way of selling the soundtrack separately right now, but stay tuned with us (a la facebook/twitter) because we’re always looking for excuses to do more future promotions that give any extras out to fans. ^_-

Paperwork? That is pretty joyless stuff. You seem pretty fired up so the two of you must look like a mismatched pair at the moment!

So what do you mean by having trouble fitting the second game onto PSN? I’ve downloaded PS3 games several GB in size. PSP can run multi-disc PS1 games. But its a problem for a 2 disc UMD game? Must not be as simple as changing it from “insert UMD2″ to “load eboot2″ :p Lunar and other games let you use the save file from the demo. Couldn’t such a technique be applied here? Clear file1, exit to XMB, load up file2, load game save and continue from there? Must be a nightmare to work with something so unique. :(

I hate to be a wait and see type since I’m interested in the games but what can I do? If I buy the first but not the second (should it have no PSN release) that would still mean less chance you would bring out the third. Its a conundrum! :o If worst came to worst I could dig out my PSP-2000 and play the game on that, but it would be pretty disappointing to take a backwards trail in 2011.

I’ll try looking at the games individually instead of as a set. I’m sure they’re each equally worth playing in their own right. How closely connected are the three games in this trilogy anyway?

Regarding the SC as a digital download problem, Tom explained it best on GameFaqs and I’ll rehash it here for you: The big problem is that Falcom was *unable* to release the second game as a DL version in Japan, partially due to the fact that it was released physically on two UMDs. We’re not sure exactly what the problem was, but Falcom has already announced that they’ve learned it’s impossible to release as a downloadable game. And if they can’t release it as a digital download, there’s a pretty good chance we won’t be able to, either… which could be a problem.

I’m not sure your suggestion would work either (we’re not developers in any sense) since even the makers of game couldn’t do it. :( It’s something we’re trying to figure out a solution to anyway.

As for the wait-and-see thing, it is a pretty big conundrum. :P All I can say is that FC is a worthwhile game on its own, so I don’t think you’d regret the purchase, at least in terms of getting your money’s worth or enjoyment.

FC and SC are tied pretty close together, but TC is more like an extra that just adds more depth to the previous two. Reoccurring characters, new info, etc.

Sora no Kiseki is probably the most amazing RPG ever. I have been waiting for this for a long time, and I already have the UMD on pre-order. Please tell me that you guys are planning on releasing the second and third chapters on PSP at some point in the near future. I have to say thank you for this wonderful gift from overseas!

Thank you so much for your pre-order! As for the subsequent titles, we’re trying our best to make sure they see the light of day. There are some things to overcome/meet, but we’ve had such wonderful support from our fans that I’m sure we’ll find some way to manage it.

I’d just like to say, Miss Chavez, that your Falcom deal was the single biggest reason, if not the ONLY reason I decided to buy a PSP. Especially because of Trails in the Sky and all the work you guys put into the game. I mean, the fact that there’s a freaking NOVEL in there had me sold. I’ll be spending quite a lot of time in the library. But you guys really deserve all the money you get. You deserve to sell millions of copies of each game, actually. You’re doing a valuable service for us fans. I’ve had this on preorder for a few weeks now and simply cannot wait for the release. Here’s hoping I can dig up the cash to buy the three Ys games (I literally just bought this PSP in the past month or so)! And SC…and TC…

Thanks for making all that hard work worthwhile. ^_^ We’re really grateful to have such dedicated fans that have been supporting our partnership with Falcom from Ys to Trails in the Sky. I really hope you enjoy Liberl and all its literary offerings (the Carnelia is sooooo LONG). Don’t forget the eye-drops if you’re going to be spending most of your playtime in the Book section of the menu!

Haha yes, number 11 did intrigue me! And thank you so much for the Youtube link! Listening to the tracks and it reminds me of the good ol’ high school days where I would come home from school to play some SNES/Genesis rpgs until I got drowsy. Now I feel like I need to buy the Y’s game on PSP to relive those days…

Cute icon! Though I have no idea why you have that facial expression. Drink, food, nuking machine all a roll away in your chair! Maybe it’s because of the neck beard? =P

The music does evoke that soft, fuzzy feeling of the teenage years, no? And I heartily recommend the Ys series if you want to prolong that sensation. Those games are just saturated in nostalgia.

As for my ‘icon’, that’s the face you get after staring at excel sheets for endless hours upon hours. And the abundance of hair is a purely gene-related accomplishment. As a half-mexican I find it very easy to grow ‘neck beards’. :)

I’m going to have to buy me some TitS, although that may concern my wife when i tell her…

Thank you greatly for bringing us a turn-based RPG!! They are the only reason i bought a PSP so by bringing this game over, you get my money. It makes me sad every day that the current gen of home consoles are dead to turn-based RPGs =(

Jessica, I think that its pretty incredible that you took the time to answer EVERY darn post on here! My Lawd! If only the PS Blog itself were so dilligent, I would have heard about my beloved White Knight Chronicles 2 already! Alas I am left to fret in obscurity! (Publish that shizz if SCEA are being weird about it!)

That’s why I love XSEED so much, you guys are truly dedicated to your niche market and fans. You’re up there with NISA and Atlus (though they’re shifting to more commercial interests lately)! I know its a business, but there are some companies that care about the consumer and some that just care about the bottom line. XSEED seem to be the former.

Hopefully one day when you’re a massive publishing house like Square (sans Enix, that was the kiss of death), you won’t forget about the little people! :)

Shame you don’t have any developers in your pocket that you could co-develop a JRPG with. That would be awesomesauce.

Well, you guys took the time to comment, so I think it’s only fair that I reciprocate. ^_- Plus I love talking 1-on-1 with fans. How else am I going to know what you want and how I can give it to you? Fret not, for we (XSEED) are always listening. Every forum post, every blog, every tweet… I am WATCHING. (Just kidding) (well, somewhat kidding)

We are as dedicated and crazy as you guys. Our fans are nothing if not supportive when we do well, and forgiving when we misstep, and always willing to throw themselves behind our oft-mentioned “suicidal business practices.” :)

Hopefully, if we ever manage to hire more grunts, peons and lackeys and become giants of publishing, we will still go on twitter to wax poetic over bacon with our fans. That’s a promise actually. I don’t think I’ll ever stop talking about bacon. And god(s) help you all if we ever take that step into developing… heh heh heh…

TitS, wow how did that elude me!? I’m super excited for this game! It is looking fantastic. I love these premium editions you guys are making, they are gorgeous. I’ve already preordered the game at my local gamestop. Unfortunately they only have one listing(at 39.99) and have no clue if its supposed to be the premium edition or not. Any idea if the premium edition is coming to Canada?

It eluded us too for a bit, and then we all kind of burst out laughing. Our translator was adamant about “Trails in the Sky” though, and we bow to his interpretation (as it is still highly appropriate despite the chuckle-worthy acronym).

Thanks for ordering the LE, and 39.99 is the proper LE price so I think you have it right. And it’s definitely coming to Canada. I know for certain that Amazon.ca has it up for grabs. Not sure about Gamestop online though…?

Oh, and would it really be an issue releasing the subsequent games in the trilogy on the PSN? Wouldn’t they just merge both UMDs into one large 1-2 gig file? Pretty sure Square Enix will be launching a digital version of Final Fantasy Type-0 and that is 2 UMDs. So if the precedent wasn’t there before, it is now, or will be soon. There are already substantially large digital PSP games (Persona 1.1 gigs, comes to mind) on the PSN.

If all else fails they should have that whole digital PSP size-limit business sorted out by the NGP launch, and you can just bring it to us in glorious portable HD! :) It will fit on an NGP card too. But I’d prefer the digital option to be honest.

Do you know Tom (I don’t know his last name)? He’s a huge advocate for the Ys series, and since Xseed Games is the publisher for YS and LOH, I thought I’d ask.

And…. yep, I got the limited edition pre-ordered. I can’t say this enough, I’m glad you guys aren’t charging us a HUGE PREMIUM for the special editions. It’s nice to see you guys aren’t like Activision/EA games, etc.

Bought a PSPGo from a friend for 75 bucks. Heard stories about there being a “lack” of RPG’s on the system, so I was kind of scared after I paid….how wrong I was. There are so many good JRPG’s out there, I NEED MORE MONEY lol. I have yet to play an XSeed game yet, but I want to get Ys Seven, Ys OF and now (because of you I might add) this. I gotta pick one for now, and I have no idea what to choose. Three great options though. And on top of whichever one I pick, I gotta get the new Dissidia to. If only money trees existed lol.

Btw I have never seen such awesome consumer treatment from a video game publisher. It’s awesome how accesibble XSeed has been on here. Keep up the great work.

There are TONS of great RPGs for the PSP system! (which we have been releasing most of our titles on recently) Ys 7, Ys Felghana, Ys I&II, Half-Minute Hero, Lunar:SSH, Brave Story, Wild Arms XF, Trails in the Sky (^_-) will all likely suit your RPG needs. I hear ya about the limited funds, but we’re happy that you aim to spend some of it on one of our titles. And, we try to be as accesible to our fans as we can when it comes to communication stuff. We respond as much as we can and we really like talking with you guys. If you feel like joining the facebook/twitter community for more 1-on-1 we’d love to have you.

Thanks for clarifying things! I certainly appreciate it! Sucks to hear TitS and SC are so closely related but I do have a normal PSP if it comes down to it. I wonder if certain people with certain methods have been able to convert it to digital format but its best not to go there (hello thought police!). If Falcom themselves couldn’t do it, well never say never but I’ll completely understand some things aren’t meant to be.

Thank goodness there’s some time between now and the 29th. I need to finish Pokemon B/W, Okamiden, Ys I & II Chronicles, Yakuza 4, Star Ocean TLHI, Resident Evil 3, …and so much more. Regardless, I’m onboard for downloading Trails from PSN whenever Grace Chen deems us worthy of receiving the PSN store update that day. Wonder what the file size on this one will be. I’d hope for something close to Ys Seven but given all of the stuff crammed into the game I’m betting it will be quite a deal larger heh.

You’re going to get it? ;_; Even with the concerns? (there is no emoticon to express acknowledgement of bravery.) You have courage in the face of uncertainty, sir! Though we know not what the future holds, I can say that Trails in the Sky will not be a waste of money spent and every bit of support it gets helps. ILook forward to it and come back to talk more on the next blog I do. ^_-

And, no problem about the clairifying stuff. It’s definitely a concern for us, and we hope to find some way around it. Digital sales are really important nowadays and we want everyone to have access to the game as well.

Anyway, sounds like you have a pretty big backlog to catch up with before the release of Trails, so get to it!

The game only has battle voices (strikes, special move call outs, etc) and I’m afraid it’s only in English. There are samples on our web page if you’d like to have a listen and see how they are. Hope the wait hasn’t been too long for you! (they do take a lot of time to localize…)

@39 Yeah, the PSP has been the go-to guy for JRPGs this gen. Home consoles are lagging (Sony is catching up, Nintendo, I don’t know what they’re doing, and MS abandoned the JRPG in 2009). The DS was alright, but most of them were the SNES, sprite, retro type games. DS didn’t render polygons with any grace and all of their animated videos suffered from horrid compression artifacting. No offence to XSEED for their contributions on that front, played Avalon Code and another one I can’t recall the name of – great games, but poor graphics.

Pricing changes on PSN have to be put in well in advance, so you’ll see the new pricing take into effect next Tuesday, 3/29… which coincidentily is when TitS is releasing. Do I sense a double-purchase…? :)

I live in England and I pre-ordered the premium edition of Trails from videogamesplus.ca the moment it appeared on their site. I did the same with the premium editions of Ys Seven, Felghana and Chronicles, and just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work that you, Tom and all the XSEED team have put in to bring these excellent games to the western world. Many thanks too for releasing all of them on the european PSN, it’s great that you’re supporting Falcom’s fans worldwide and not just in America!

Can’t wait to play Trails, everything I hear about it makes it sound incredible, and I hope you can resolve the problems surrounding the PSN release of the second game. I will surely pre-order the premium edition of it too, if you decide to release one.

Is there any chance XSEED could release the PC versions of the Trails in the Sky games? Also, I’d like to say that if you ever decide to release the PC version of Ys Origin, I’d buy it on day one!

Sorry if this has been asked before but will the game feature the original Japanese songs in-game or has it been re-dubbed in English? I know for Lunar the title theme was redone in English but I liked the Japanese version. =(